38

Hells Canyon

THE PRICE THAT LYNDON JOHNSON now realized the South would accept to allow a civil rights bill to pass—that the bill be restricted to voting, and include a jury trial amendment—seemed a price simply too high for him to meet. Most of the twenty-seven non-southern Democratic senators, and the overwhelming majority of the forty-six Republicans,* were opposed to both these conditions. “The South,” with its twenty-two Senate votes, “is completely without allies,” George Reedy wrote in a memo to Johnson in the Spring of 1957, and he was exaggerating only slightly; when, in late Spring, Johnson embarked on his quest for a civil rights bill, there was available, should the South’s two conditions come to a showdown, no place to find enough votes to meet them. And since the South would lose on a vote, it would simply not allow one. It would filibuster. And though they had no allies on civil rights, on a filibuster the situation would be far different. On a cloture vote, you got up to thirty-three real fast. There could be filibusters at any one—or all—of several points. Since killing the bill was so important to the South, Richard Russell would not want to risk everything on a single cloture vote, and would begin filibustering at the earliest point: the vote to put the bill on the Calendar. The measure would be kept bottled up in the Judiciary Committee as long as possible, and if a motion was finally made on the Senate floor to discharge it from Judiciary and place it on the Calendar, the South would filibuster that motion, beginning debate on it, and then extending the debate, and continuing to extend it—for as long as was necessary to block the motion from coming to a vote. And if that filibuster was cut off by cloture, the South could filibuster again to prevent the bill from being called off the Calendar and brought to the floor for debate and vote, and if that filibuster failed, too, could filibuster yet again to prevent that final floor vote. (The South would also, of course, filibuster a motion to place a House-passed civil rights bill directly on the Calendar without it being sent to Judiciary.) For Lyndon Johnson to pass the bill, he had to find allies for the South: votes for its positions on Part III and jury trials, as well as the assurance of votes against cloture in case it lost on those points. And, with the session already deep in May, he had to find those votes almost immediately. Only if the South felt confident that the votes would be there if they were needed would it allow the bill to reach the Calendar. Johnson had to let the South know that it was not alone, that it had allies in the Senate.

He had, in addition, to let the South know that it had enough allies. The bill was too important for Russell to risk everything on a vote in which the margin would be so narrow that it might be changed at the last moment. A handful, or two handfuls, of promised votes would not make the South feel confident that an unacceptable bill could not pass, confident enough so that it could allow the measure to reach the Calendar. Lyndon Johnson had to find not merely a few votes but a whole group of votes: a large, solid Senate bloc.

In May, 1957, with Republicans and liberal Democrats lined up solidly behind a civil rights bill, with the necessity for a bill dramatized by the struggles in the South, and with the press and public demand for a bill rising, the formation of such a bloc seemed outside the realm of possibility. Determined though Johnson might be, determination couldn’t create that bloc. Listening couldn’t create it. This problem was so dramatically intractable that something more was needed—not only legislative leadership, but legislative genius.

Recruiting an entire bloc of allies for the South would require an ability to conceive and then create not merely individual deals, simple quid pro quos, and not merely a series of interrelated deals (complicated though that in itself could be), but a single, much broader, deal—a deal broad enough to bring an entire group of senators to the side of the South in one stroke: a quid pro quo of a magnitude so sweeping as to be truly national in scope. Lyndon Johnson found that deal—found a bloc—and found a means of bringing it to the South’s side.

The means was a mountain canyon, a canyon not in the South but more than two thousand miles away: beyond the Appalachians, beyond the Mississippi Basin, beyond the Great Plains, beyond the Rocky Mountains—in the rugged Sawtooth Mountains that rose beyond the Rockies in America’s far Northwest.

Hells Canyon (it had been given its name by pioneering mountain men whose boats had been capsized by its foaming white rapids) was an astonishing work of nature. Carved into one of the most inaccessible parts of the Sawtooth Range by the Snake River, its rock walls rose from the Snake’s turbulent waters in a widening V that was almost eight thousand feet high—a thousand feet higher than the Grand Canyon; it was the deepest river gorge on the continent of North America. And it had been the subject for some years of a debate over who would harness the enormous power generated by its turbulent waters: the public, through a dam built by the federal government, or a private power company.

That question had become in some ways the hottest political issue in Oregon and Idaho, the two states separated by the Snake. For ten years, public power advocates, including both of Oregon’s current senators, Wayne Morse and Richard Neuberger, had been trying to obtain authorization to build a federal dam, and for ten years these attempts had been blocked by private power advocates in Congress. And then hardly had the Eisenhower Administration taken office in 1953 when its Secretary of the Interior, Douglas McKay, a former Governor of Oregon, announced that legislation would be introduced to allow the Idaho Power Company to build three hydroelectric dams in Hells Canyon and sell the electricity they generated. The full extent of this “giveaway” of national resources became known when it was revealed that the Administration had granted Idaho Power an accelerated tax write-off that would generate $239 million in additional profits. But to Republicans, including President Eisenhower, the idea of using taxpayers’ money to build a project that private capital was willing to finance was a perfect example of New Deal profligacy. Assailing the Administration’s “shocking abandonment” of the public power concept, Morse reintroduced his proposed authorization of a federal dam, but when the showdown over his bill came in 1956, “Republican senators reported,” as Marquis Childs wrote, “that they had never before [during the Eisenhower Administration] been under such pressure,” and the bill had been defeated.

That defeat, however, made the issue hotter than ever. The governors of Oregon and Idaho, supporters of Idaho Power, ran for re-election in 1956, and both lost. In that year, furthermore, McKay returned to Oregon to run against Morse, calling the issue “American free enterprise” against “the left-wing Socialist idea.” McKay was routed. Across the Snake, in Idaho, there was another Senate campaign, with Herman Welker, private power advocate, running for re-election against Frank Church. “The campaign was Frank Church versus Idaho Power,” one of Church’s aides says. “They fought him tooth and nail.” Welker lost, too.

Since Morse and Neuberger and Church had made Hells Canyon their central campaign issue, their constituents would be watching to see if they produced on it. And the senators wanted to produce on it—all three believed deeply in the concept of public power.

The Hells Canyon fight had reverberations in other states—in the Far Northwest and southward down the long line of the Rockies—for these states were tied together physically by the transmission lines from huge federal dams already built (the lines from the Bonneville Dam on the Oregon-Washington border, for example, ran not only across these states but into Idaho and Montana as well) and philosophically by the concept symbolized by these lines: that America’s rivers belonged to the people, and the electricity they generated should be provided to the people at the lowest possible cost. Hydroelectric power generated in these states by the fall of the waters of their rivers down through their tall mountains was the region’s greatest natural resource, and in nine states—the seven so-called “Mountain States” (Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Nevada) and the Far Northwest states of Washington and Oregon, whose mountains were not the Rockies but the Cascades—the question of how to get water, scarce in those states, and the power that water can generate, out of the rugged mountain ranges to irrigate millions of acres, mechanize tens of thousands of farms, and furnish inexpensive electricity to attract new industry was a fiercely contentious issue. The debate between those who wanted the rivers developed by the federal government in order to keep rates down, preserve natural resources and beauty, and encourage the comprehensive development of river basins, and those who hated the concept of public power because they believed it led to socialism, bureaucracy, and a planned economy (and to lower profits for private utilities) was a continuing focal point of politics in these states—and in the Senate: Morse’s speeches on behalf of a Hells Canyon Dam had been notable, but no more notable than those of Washington State’s Scoop Jackson; and that state’s other senator, Warren Magnuson, while no great speechmaker, had used his Commerce Committee gavel effectively in the dam’s behalf. Morse, Neuberger, Jackson, Magnuson, New Mexico’s Anderson, Montana’s Murray—all were members of a western “public power bloc” in the Senate. In all, there were, from these nine western states, a total of twelve Democratic senators who wanted the dam in Hells Canyon to be a federal dam.

Despite years of effort, however, the public power bloc had not been able to get that dam authorized. The private power forces in the Senate were, as Leland Olds had learned years earlier, very strong. (Olds had the lesson taught to him again in 1955 after he had testified for two days on behalf of the Hells Canyon Dam: a Federal Power Commission examiner called his testimony “irrelevant,” and had every word of it stricken from the record except for two items: his name and address.) During the 1956 battle over Morse’s Hells Canyon Dam Bill, Republicans had made the necessary arrangements. Welker had secretly approached Louisiana’s Russell Long, for example, and pledged to support the Tidelands oil legislation Long wanted if Long would vote against Hells Canyon in the Interior Committee. Long had agreed, and Morse’s bill had died in Interior. Now, in 1957, Morse and Neuberger were again trying—with assistance from Church—to persuade Interior to report the bill out, but they weren’t succeeding. The western senators simply didn’t have enough allies on public power.

As the South didn’t have enough allies on civil rights.

LYNDON JOHNSON saw a potential connection between those two realities. No one else had seen it. During the ten years that Hells Canyon had been before Congress, there had never been the slightest link between the dam and civil rights. The civil rights issue had never aroused much interest in these western states—in part because so few of their residents would be directly affected by it. More than half a million people lived in Montana in 1956; about one thousand of them were Negroes. Another half million lived in Idaho; about one thousand of them were Negroes. The total Negro population of the nine states was about 79,000—fewer Negroes than lived in some counties in Georgia or Mississippi, fewer than lived in the single congressional district that was New York’s Harlem. But now Lyndon Johnson saw that not only could the dam authorization bill be brought into a relationship with a civil rights bill, but that that relationship could be the key to passing a civil rights bill.

The very paucity of Negroes in the western states was a key to his reasoning. Although many of the twelve Democratic senators from these states were liberals, civil rights was not a high-priority issue to their constituents, so these senators had flexibility on a civil rights bill: they could support it or not, with impunity. Hells Canyon, on the other hand, was a high-priority issue. Years later, talking with Doris Kearns Goodwin, Johnson would explain his reasoning, with his customary hyperbole—and his customary brilliance. “I began with the assumption that most of the senators from the Mountain States had never seen a Negro and simply couldn’t care all that much about the whole civil rights issue,” he told her. “I knew what they did care about, and that was the Hells Canyon issue. So I went to a few key southerners and persuaded them to back the western liberals on Hells Canyon.”

Tidelands wasn’t the most important issue this year, he told Russell Long; there was more at stake now. Long understood the oblique phrase—and besides, the Louisiana senator was to recall years later, “With Herman Welker out … it was a whole new … ball game”; with the deal he had made with Welker now void, “it was not a matter of great consequence to me whether you built a high (federal) dam at Hells Canyon or a low (private) dam at Hells Canyon.” What mattered was that civil rights bill—the jury trial amendment, for example—and Lyndon managed to “work it out in such a fashion that some of the western senators would go along with us on the jury trial problem if we’d go along with them on the Hells Canyon issue.” Long was happy to go along.

With southern gentlemen like Long, the matter was handled in a gentlemanly fashion; putting his arm around one of these southerners in the cloakroom, Johnson would say, “Look, if you don’t help them [the western senators], you can’t expect them to help you when it’s your ox that’s getting gored.” In other cases, the transaction was more straightforward. Montana’s Jim Murray approached Jim Eastland to solicit his vote for the dam. “I need help on Hells Canyon,” he said. Eastland’s reply was blunt: “I need help on civil rights,” he said. He told Murray to “see Dick Russell,” and Russell told the elderly Montana liberal—in a statement seconded by Johnson—that southern votes would be available for Hells Canyon if the westerners were prepared to be “reasonable” on civil rights. And with other southerners, the transaction was blunter still. Some of the southern conservatives felt so strongly about the “socialism” symbolized by the proposed dam that they responded to Johnson’s overtures by saying they couldn’t vote for it. Johnson spelled out for these senators a reality they had overlooked. Senate authorization of a federal dam wouldn’t really mean that a dam would be built, he said; House authorization and presidential signature would still be required—and neither requirement was likely to be met. Johnson may even have guaranteed some southerners that those requirements would not be met; at least one administrative assistant says that Johnson let it be known that the House Interior Committee was not going to let the Hells Canyon bill come to the House floor.

One way or another, Johnson persuaded the southern senators to place at his disposal as many votes as would be needed to pass the Senate bill authorizing a federal dam in Hells Canyon; in a particularly shrewd gesture, Richard Russell agreed that he would be one of those senators, although in previous years he had opposed such authorization. That gesture would be so plain that even the densest westerner would be able to understand it: Russell was the South; the westerners would know that if he was with them, the South would be with them—with as many votes as were necessary. Then Johnson let the westerners know what he had done—and why, assuring them that they would have the backing of the South. And “in return,” he was to tell Doris Kearns Goodwin, “I got the western liberals to back the southerners” on civil rights.

SINCE THE WESTERNERS WERE LIBERALS, and proud of their liberal image, they were not eager to have it known that they had traded away their support for a strong civil rights bill. They let the final arrangement be confirmed through an aide, Morse’s trusted assistant Merton C. Bernstein, a young labor lawyer. Shortly before Morse’s bill authorizing the high dam was to come to the floor, the confirmation had not yet taken place and the western senators were unsure if they would really have the southern votes. A luncheon was therefore arranged in Bobby Baker’s office one flight up in the Capitol at which Johnson would be present along with a group of western senators and Bernstein. During the lunch, Bernstein recalls, “Lyndon Johnson didn’t put a bite of food in his mouth. He never stopped talking.” But not about Hells Canyon—not a word. After the senators had finished dessert, Morse said, “Well, Mert, you know where everybody stands,” and walked out—as did the other senators. “I was left there with Lyndon Johnson,” Bernstein recalls. And then, with the westerners not there to hear the sordid details, “Johnson went down the whole list of senators who could be persuaded to do something helpful. He undertook to get those who he could”—and he made clear he could get enough. “Now, Smathers is a private utility man,” Bernstein recalls Johnson saying. “But I think I can bring him along.” The westerners could stop worrying about Russell Long: “Leave him to me,” Johnson said; “I can get Russell Long.” They could stop worrying about Alan Bible, he said. “Bible will do whatever I tell him to do.” As for Harry Byrd, Johnson said, “Now Harry Byrd is a man of principle. I can’t ask Harry Byrd to do anything against his principles. But I can ask Harry Byrd—and he might oblige me—to stay away [during the vote on the Hells Canyon Dam, and not vote against it].” Bernstein understood what Johnson was doing. The Majority Leader was letting him know—and through him, Morse and the other western senators—that “he was working hard to get the votes for us because he wanted” western votes in return. Johnson was sealing the deal. Bernstein reported the conversation to Morse, and, at Morse’s instructions, to the other western senators, and they also understood what Johnson was doing—and the price he wanted in return. “We knew that Johnson was not being a Boy Scout. We knew that he was trying to build a coalition” against the parts of the civil rights bill “to which the southerners were objecting.”

The westerners agreed to pay that price. Lyndon Johnson, Russell Long was to say, “put together sort of a gentleman’s agreement where about four of us would vote for the high dam at Hells Canyon and about four of the fellows on the other side would vote with us…. Four votes shifted in favor of that high dam at Hells Canyon and then four votes shifted, or at least came down on … a completely unrelated subject: civil rights.”

Long’s memory is a little blurry as to the precise figure: the number of votes that actually shifted on that first ballot was not four but five. And the number of western liberal Democratic votes that, as a result of the Hells Canyon deal, would shift to the side of the South on later civil rights ballots would vary from ballot to ballot. Nor is the exact number of votes that shifted an accurate indication of the dimensions of the deal. Since the southerners would not want to be seen voting for the Hells Canyon Dam, Johnson would use as few of them as possible on the Hells Canyon vote. Since the liberal westerners would not want to be seen voting against civil rights, Johnson would use as few of them as possible on the civil rights vote. On each civil rights vote, he would use the minimum number of westerners necessary to accomplish his purposes, not requiring the others to vote with the South. But the fundamental nature of the deal is what Johnson said it was—in return for southern votes for Hells Canyon, “I got the western liberals to back the southerners” on civil rights. While, from vote to vote, the number of westerners would vary, whatever the number needed, the number would be there. It would be there on Part III, and on the jury trial amendment. And the South could be confident that, if it was needed, it would be there on cloture as well. And the total number of these westerners—the number that might, if necessary, be available to the South—was twelve. In a single stroke—by linking Hells Canyon and civil rights—Lyndon Johnson had brought to the side of the South not just a few senators but a substantial bloc.

And the South therefore was now willing to allow a civil rights bill to be placed on the Calendar. Its senators would still vote against the motion to put it on the Calendar, of course, so that they could tell their constituents they had opposed the motion, but they would forgo the filibuster that would, by preventing the motion from coming to a vote, have made their opposition effective. The South had previously been adamant in its opposition to allowing the bill to go on the Calendar; isolated—without allies—it had felt itself defenseless against a strong civil rights bill except for the filibuster, and therefore had not been willing to forgo any of the opportunities to use that tactic. Thanks to Lyndon Johnson, that fear had now been somewhat alleviated; the South had allies now. And the South was therefore somewhat more willing to let the bill proceed, in the hope that as it proceeded it could be watered down; it could allow the bill onto the Calendar because, should the bill thereafter still remain too strong to be tolerated, it would still have two opportunities left to filibuster: on the motion to bring the bill off the Calendar to the Senate floor; and, if that filibuster was defeated, on the motion to vote on the bill. The South had also now been assured that, should it have to make its stand in those last two trenches, it would no longer be standing alone. If, despite its new alliance with the West, it was still unable to muster enough votes to water down Part III and jury trials and it was forced to filibuster, it would have, added to the anti-cloture votes of the Republican reactionaries, some anti-cloture votes from the western liberals—so there would almost certainly be no vote on the bill itself.

SINCE LYNDON JOHNSON was making his Hells Canyon-civil rights deal in secret, the progress he was making was invisible. Working out the deal took time, too, and for some weeks in May the keystone in the South’s defense—Jim Eastland’s Judiciary Committee—remained solid.

Liberal frustrations kept spilling over on the Senate floor. Once, in late May, with Eastland slouched comfortably at his desk near the center, near the front, Hubert Humphrey, from his desk further to the side, further to the rear, noted that although Judiciary’s distinguished chairman had only three southern colleagues on his committee, few as they were, the four southerners “are like the Spartans at the Pass of Thermopylae. They certainly ‘mow ’em down.’” Humphrey made his remark with a wry smile, but Douglas, two desks further to the side, could not conceal his bitterness when he rose, and said, “This bill has been before the committee since January. Hearings were started in February. The hearings were concluded in March. It is now very nearly the end of May. If we do not get a bill on the floor very soon, we know exactly what will happen.”

It took Eastland a while to rise to respond to Douglas; one might even have thought his deliberateness verged on discourtesy. When he was on his feet at last and had turned to look up at the two liberals, he made it clear that he, too, knew exactly what was going to happen—and that that knowledge was not displeasing. Certainly, he said, he couldn’t do anything to increase the pace of the committee’s deliberations; that was in the hands of his distinguished fellow committee members. “Ah’m just the errand boy of the committee,” he said, but he doubted that any of its members would seriously want to interfere with the right of a fellow member to be heard in committee at whatever length he felt necessary.

Liberal discouragement was echoed in the Republican Legislative Leaders’ Meeting in the White House, where reality had finally sunk in fully. The civil rights bill was going to pass in the House, President Eisenhower was told at the June 4 conference. But Knowland, reporting on the Senate, was forced to warn Eisenhower that efforts to push the bill through Judiciary had better stop, for there were other things that could be done in Judiciary—to other Administration programs: What if the liberals on the committee succeeded in their demand that the committee hold uninterrupted civil rights hearings? he asked. Eastland could then simply extend these hearings, which would mean that no other measures could be taken up. “Among the measures that could” then “be tied up” in Judiciary “are changes in immigration laws, which you are anxious to get through, Mr. President.” Knowland said he would continue to do his best, “but, to be realistic, the outlook for civil rights in the Senate is not encouraging. I am afraid the bill [will] either die in the Judiciary Committee or be reported too late for favorable action on the floor, even if we could overcome a filibuster.”

Discouragement was echoed in the liberal press. “The prospects [for civil rights] in the Senate are, to put it mildly, gloomy; and they are not helped by the fact that the Majority Leader, Mr. Johnson of Texas, is also against it,” the New York Times said in a May 23 editorial.

There was as little leadership from Dwight Eisenhower as ever. On June 4, Frederic Morrow, the only black executive in the White House, sent a memo to presidential chief of staff Sherman Adams almost begging the President to grant the leaders of his race the courtesy of at least meeting with them. Noting that A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King had been asking “for an audience with the President” for more than a year with no response from the White House, Morrow wrote, “I can state categorically that the rank and file of Negroes in the country feel that the President has deserted them…. I feel the time is ripe for the President to see two or three outstanding Negro leaders, and to let them get off their chests the things that seem to be giving them great concern…. Their present feeling is that their acknowledged leadership is being ignored, snubbed, and belittled by the President and his staff. Even though we may be aware of what these men will say when they meet the President, it is important that they be able to meet him and say it face to face.” There was no response from the President. As late as the end of May, as late as the beginning of June, the 1957 civil rights bill seemed destined for the same fate as the 1956 civil rights bill—and of so many previous civil rights bills. Even while Lyndon Johnson was finalizing the Hells Canyon arrangement that would make it possible for the civil rights bill to come to the floor, it was almost universally assumed that the bill was dead.

No connection with civil rights was immediately drawn, therefore, when, suddenly, on June 6, Johnson began, as one article put it, “to turn up the heat” to bring to the Senate floor “the bill authorizing construction of a federal dam in Hells Canyon.” But there was a connection: movement was simultaneously beginning on civil rights as well. Five months earlier, Johnson had decreed that the Senate would not take up Brownell’s civil rights bill until after the House had passed it, and for months that bill, labelled H.R. 6127, had been blocked by the House Rules Committee. Johnson’s ally Rayburn could have intervened, but he had not done so. Now, suddenly, he did—with an unexpected series of parliamentary rulings. On June 6, the same day the “heat” was turned up to bring the Hells Canyon bill to the Senate floor, H.R. 6127 was released by the House Rules Committee and brought to the House floor.

In mid-June, with the bill nearing passage by the House, there was movement—significant movement—in the Senate. It was initiated by Republicans. Knowland announced that he would introduce a motion to bypass the Judiciary Committee by sending the House-passed bill, the Administration bill, directly to the Senate Calendar, Nixon let it be known that he was ready to help get the motion passed—and the Republicans may have thought, as most journalists thought, that they were providing the impetus. Reporting that Nixon and Knowland are “teaming up in a drive to get Senate action,” the Washington Post said on June 16 that “Both appear to believe the [Republican presidential] nomination will be worth more to the man who gets it if they can get the Republicans credited with passing a civil rights bill.” But what was significant was that although the southerners were denouncing the measure, they did not use their most effective weapon against it. On June 18, the House, by a 286–126 vote, passed H.R. 6127, sending it to the Senate. Since Knowland’s motion was expected to touch off at least a major Senate floor fight if not a filibuster, the actual denouement came as a considerable surprise. Although the southern senators attacked the motion and their anger against it was genuine—Richard Russell actually shouted as he said, “Don’t give me that holier-than-thou talk about voting! What they are thinking about is schools!” and warned of “setting a precedent that will haunt the Senate for many years to come”—their actual resistance was not; its pro forma nature became clear when, on June 20, the South, declining to filibuster, allowed Knowland’s motion to come to a vote after only nine hours of debate. The motion passed, 45 to 39. (Johnson voted with the South, but took no part in the debate.) And the reason that the opposition was only pro forma became apparent immediately after the vote. The very next item of business that the Majority Leader introduced was a motion to call off the Calendar and bring to a vote the bill authorizing construction of a federal dam in Hells Canyon. “Mr. President,” Johnson said, “I desire to serve notice on all senators that we expect to have a vote on this bill tomorrow … early in the day tomorrow.” That schedule was met, and the next day, June 21, in what the New York Times called “a surprise vote,” the Hells Canyon bill was passed, 45 to 38. And the reason became even more apparent when the votes on these two seemingly unrelated issues were analyzed.

Among the thirty-nine votes against the motion putting a civil rights bill on the Calendar were five cast by senators whose appearance on the anti-civil rights side was startling: Morse of Oregon, Magnuson of Washington, Murray and Mansfield of Montana, and O’Mahoney of Wyoming. (Morse’s vote against the motion was particularly startling, since less than a week earlier he had enthusiastically supported it.) Those five western senators, normally liberal stalwarts, had voted with the South this time. Their five votes did not change the outcome: the South did not want the outcome changed. To protect Rule 22 and clean up Lyndon Johnson on civil rights, Richard Russell had decided that the civil rights bill should be allowed to go on the Senate Calendar. Those five votes were the signal Russell wanted that the West would stand with the South on future civil rights votes. Of the forty-five votes in favor of the Hells Canyon bill, five were cast by southerners who had voted against the identical bill in 1956. The bill had been defeated in 1956. It passed in 1957 because those five southerners switched, and voted for it. They were Russell Long, George Smathers, Sam Ervin, Jim Eastland—and Richard Russell, whose vote, since he was the leader of the South, was a signal: that since the westerners would stand with the South on its great issue, the South would stand with the West on its great issue.

TWO DAYS BEFORE the Hells Canyon vote, the freshman senator from Idaho had delivered his maiden speech—on the dam that he had made the big issue in his campaign. He had been polishing the speech for weeks, and it showed the Senate why Frank Church had been national oratorical champion. A searing attack on Idaho Power’s proposed three small dams—“small plans for small tomorrows”—he asked the Senate to declare instead for big dreams, like the public power dreams of George Norris and his idol, Borah. Assailing the concept that private interests ought to be able to monopolize and reap profit from America’s natural resources, he said the Hells Canyon bill “serves no interest, save the people’s interest.” When he finished, the older public power liberals like Morse and Douglas who had been fighting for Hells Canyon for years crowded around his desk to congratulate him. “Magnificent!” Paul Douglas said. “Truly magnificent!” An Idaho journalist dubbed him “the boy orator of the Snake.”

Following their victory two days later, the older western senators knew whom they wanted to get the credit. When a photographer summoned them out to the Vice President’s Room for a photograph, they pushed Church to the front. Douglas took one of Church’s arms and Hubert Humphrey the other, and raised them high in a victory sign. Church’s cheeks were naturally rosy, and he was blushing, so they were even redder than usual, and he gave a loud shout of triumph. His elation over the vote was understandable. “It made him,” explains his legislative assistant Ward Hower. Young and untested though he was, by “delivering” on an issue so important to his state, “he was able to convey to the people of Idaho that they had elected a winner, that he alreadyhad some clout in the Senate.”

The elation of all the twelve Hells Canyon Democrats was understandable, at least in political terms. They had been fighting for a federal dam for a long time, and they had never before had a victory in the fight. This Senate vote would not, as it turned out, be a true victory but only a temporary win in a losing battle, because Lyndon Johnson’s cynical prediction would prove correct: neither the favorable House vote nor the presidential signature needed to make the dam a reality were realistic possibilities. In the event, some years later, three smaller dams—only slightly improved versions of the ones Idaho Power had proposed—would eventually be built. But at the moment of the Senate vote, these senators saw at least a first step toward the federal dam. And in political terms, the victory truly was a victory. They had delivered on their promises to their constituents: the body of which they were members had passed the bill they had promised. How could they be blamed if the bill didn’t pass in the House? A great favor had been done for them, and they knew whom to thank for it. Church, still learning the ropes in the Senate, and perhaps understandably a bit overimpressed with the power of his oratory, had had to have the facts of Senate life explained to him. As he had been heading back to his office after his speech, still filled with emotion, he had heard footsteps behind him and, turning, saw Clinton Anderson, who had not merely congratulations but a question: had Church been consulting Lyndon Johnson on the issue? And when Church had replied in the negative, Anderson had said, “If this bill gets passed, it will be his doing, not yours.” “I understood that it was true,” the young senator would say later. “But until he said it to me, it hadn’t gelled.” Now, after the victory, as he thought about the southern senators’ switch, it gelled further—“All credit is due to your leadership,” he wrote Johnson. The older westerners understood the realities without being told. “If it hadn’t been for his [Johnson’s] leadership, we never would have passed the bill for the high dam in Hells Canyon,” Richard Neuberger was to say. “During those days, he worked ’til eleven or midnight buttonholing senators for us. I feared for his health….”

HARDLY HAD THE FIVE WESTERNERS VOTED against putting civil rights on the Calendar when they had to begin defending themselves—against charges that their votes had been a quid pro quo for five southern votes on the dam authorization. However ringingly unequivocal their denials—calling the charges “a vicious falsehood,” Morse said he had “never in my life made a trade” on a Senate vote; Montana’s Mansfield said, “There was no deal of any kind, sort or nature, and there were no trades on the part of any Democrat with any other Democrat for votes”—they nonetheless rang false in some ears. The skeptics included Republicans. “Civil rights yesterday had a lot do with the [dam] vote today, more than most people realize,” Arthur Watkins of Utah said. Republican National Chairman Meade Alcorn charged more flatly that the five Democrats had betrayed the cause of social justice for a dam, making “a deal to swap off civil rights for Hells Canyon,” and Charles Potter of Michigan, a fervent Republican supporter of civil rights, expressed misgivings about the deal’s future consequences. He noted that “fellows supposed to be great advocates of civil rights” had lined up with the southerners. “These Southerners are pretty shrewd,” Potter said. “I hope it doesn’t include a sellout of future civil rights votes.” And the skeptics also included Democrats—including the Democratic leader in the Senate civil rights fight.

It did not take long for Paul Douglas to grasp the reality beneath the Hells Canyon vote: that, because the House almost certainly would not authorize a federal dam, the Senate vote would prove meaningless. It was only a few hours after he had raised Frank Church’s arm that he told the young senator, “Frank, I’m afraid you Hells Canyon people have been given some counterfeit money.” On the morning after the civil rights vote, newspapers were filled with Republican cries of triumph—“Look, we did it,” a White House aide said, predicting that the Administration’s civil rights bill would pass substantially as written—and with journalistic analyses of the “victory” of bipartisan civil rights forces in bypassing the long-impregnable Judiciary Committee. The vote “beat down” the southerners “for the first time in this generation,” Robert Albright wrote in the Washington Post. Advancing the bill to the Calendar put it “within easy reach of a Senate majority vote to call it up [and] thus opened up a possible route to early passage of the bill.” The papers were filled with what journalists saw as proof that, as Albright put it, “the once-powerful Republican-Southern Democratic coalition … was knocked into bits and may never get completely together again.” William S. White wrote that “The action greatly improves the prospect for the first major Senate action on civil rights since the Reconstruction era.” But Douglas, a better judge of the reality, saw in the southern-western alliance ominous implications for future civil rights votes—when the votes would be more crucial to hopes for social justice, when the votes would not be merely about putting a bill on the Calendar but on bringing the bill to the floor, and, on the floor, passing the bill. Morse’s vote was particularly distressing. The other four defecting westerners were not members of Douglas’ civil rights cadre, but Morse had been one of its leaders. Douglas saw Morse’s vote as a hint that there would be further cracks in the liberal core essential for victory. And he was incensed that Morse, who had publicly pledged only three days before to vote against the South on the Calendar proposal, had not informed him in advance that he would not in fact be voting with him. Arriving at the SOB that morning, Douglas hurried up the broad steps and called a caucus of his liberal group for three o’clock in the District of Columbia Committee Room, and the meeting turned into a scene of extreme rancor among men who were supposedly celebrating a victory.

Anger made Douglas’ face almost as white as his hair when, opening the meeting, he turned to Morse. “The first thing I want to take up is the conduct of the senior senator from Oregon,” he said. “If this were a military group he would be court-martialed. He has betrayed our cause. Furthermore, he did it on the Senate floor.” At the last caucus, he said, Morse had committed himself to vote with the rest of them—Carroll and Humphrey and Pastore and Neuberger and Clark and the rest—to wrest the bill from Jim Eastland’s hands; then he had voted to keep the bill there, and “He did not take the trouble to come back to this group first and discuss it with his colleagues.” “We can’t court-martial him,” but something must be done about this “betrayal.” “I won’t embarrass his colleague [from Oregon], Dick Neuberger,” Douglas said, “but I will call on Joe Clark for advice as to what we should do.”

Erupting in return, Morse told Douglas, “That’s what you think you’re going to do.” Instead, he said, “You’re going to listen to me and then I’m going to excuse myself. I shan’t sit here and listen to myself being abused.” His stand had changed, he said, out of conviction, not expediency—the conviction that bypassing Senate rules just to get action on a specific issue was wrong. “What I did was not easy,” he said. “I was not lacking in courage…. The Senator has said I did not come back to this group. But what good would it have done? It would just create a row.” Then, standing up, he said, “I now excuse myself,” and stalked out of the room.

There followed what Drew Pearson’s handwritten notes (one of the persons in the room evidently gave the columnist an extremely detailed account of the proceedings) referred to as a “hell of a row”—one so bitter that at its end, one of the senators, not identified in the notes, said, “There are so few of us that I feel very sad” that they were disagreeing among themselves. During the argument, Douglas voiced his forebodings, saying that he wondered if Morse’s change of heart had resulted from a larger quid pro quo with the South for Hells Canyon that would have future repercussions for the civil rights bill. Neuberger tried to reassure Douglas—“I’m sure no such thing happened. I’m sure I would know about it if he had made any such commitments”—and other senators assured him they would hold fast. “Civil rights is not a major issue in my state,” John Carroll said. “It isn’t popular in Colorado. But I’m sticking to the agreement. I consider this civil rights bill to be important and very much needed.”

Douglas’ forebodings were justified, however. Even while the westerners were firmly denying the existence of a western-southern alliance, the southerners were not reluctant to spell out for a reporter they trusted, Tom Wicker, the precise details of that alliance. After talking with several of them about their votes for Hells Canyon, Wicker wrote that “authoritative sources indicate that the Southern action was a quid for which they expect to receive a quo [on] the civil rights bill.” The quo, Wicker reported, was “that Western senators, who had unsuccessfully sought passage of a Hells Canyon bill for years, would now deliver enough votes for jury trial to attach it to the civil rights bill by about five votes.” That, Wicker reported, was the explanation for the five western votes against bypassing Judiciary. On that vote, “Western Democrats handed Southerners five votes—not enough to sustain their position but enough, as one observer put it today, ‘to let ’em know where the votes are.’”

Indignant though the western Democrats might be—or at least act—about charges that a deal had been struck,* their subsequent actions during 1957 would provide ammunition for those who believed the charges—as will be seen. Over and over again, during the succeeding weeks, the West would provide votes for the South.

JOHNSON’S DEAL was indeed one of profound cynicism. It wouldn’t give the westerners victory on Hells Canyon, it would give them only the opportunity to claim victory on Hells Canyon. It was indeed based, as Paul Douglas charged, on “counterfeit money.” In that sense, the deal was only one more in the long line of cynical maneuvers that had marked Johnson’s political career.

There were, however, differences this time. The deal had created a new reality in the Senate of the United States. For two decades, the dominant reality in the Senate had been its control by a coalition of southerners and conservative Republicans. In January, 1957, that coalition had been “knocked into bits.” The South had found itself isolated, without allies. But then Lyndon Johnson had brought new allies to the South’s side. In place of the southern-Republican coalition there was a southern-western coalition now.

And the deal had had a further result. Thanks to the arrangement that Johnson had conceived (“I went to a few key southerners and persuaded them to back the western liberals on Hells Canyon. And then, in return, I got the western liberals to back the southerners”) and that, against long odds, he had brought to completion, a civil rights bill was on the Senate Calendar, only one step removed from being on the floor, for the first time since Reconstruction. The result of Johnson’s cynicism this time was not merely a step forward for himself but a step forward for a great cause.

*Joe McCarthy died on May 2, leaving his seat vacant until a special election was held on August 28.

*Their explanation for their votes was the same as Morse’s: they were concerned that bypassing a committee would set a bad precedent for the Senate.